This event was organized by Leuren Moret and Paul Goettlich. Because
of a last-minute schedule change, Percy Schmeiser was unable to be present.
In lieu of his absence, the 26 min. video, Heartbreak In the Heartland:
The True Cost of Genetically Engineered Crops was shown. The text of the
video is presently available in three other languages: Spanish, French
(Québec), and Mandarin Chinese. Other translations that are in the
works are: Arabic, Czech, French (Paris), Hindi, Tamil, Norwegian, kiSwahili,
isiZulu; SeSotaho, Siswati, Portuguese, and Polish.

On Thursday, 17 October 2002, Percy spoke at a fundraiser for him at
the Greenpeace office in San Francisco, where about 100 people were present.
From there he attended a weekend of engagements at the Bioengineers conference
in Marin. Shortly thereafter, he made a two-week tour of South America.
And then on to Mexico. He doesn't stop because he knows that he's right.
And he has hundreds, or possibly thousands of supporters - both financial
and moral. In order for Monsanto to influence people to do their bidding,
they must spend millions of dollars constantly. It would be wonderful if
they would do some good for us all with those millions of dollars, instead
of attempting to enslave us all.

The following articles were included in the press kit: Mark Shapiro.
Sowing Disaster? The Nation 10oct02; David Schubert. A Different Perspective
on GM Food, Nature Biotechnology Oct02; Barry Commoner. Unraveling The
DNA Myth: The spurious foundation of genetic engineering. Harper's Magazine
Feb02; Charles Benbrook. Evidence of the Magnitude and Consequences of
the Roundup Ready Soybean Yield Drag from University-Based Varietal Trials
in 1998. Ag BioTech InfoNet 13jul99; Ignacio Chapela. Apocalypse Now? Lose
text of presentation at University of California, Berkeley.

Ignacio Chapela:

It's so difficult to speak after seeing Percy Schmeiser, and the Nelson
family, and the reality of farmers in the U.S. I have the same type of
feeling that I get when I also see farmers back in Mexico. I'm originally
Mexican. I've worked for many years with indigenous communities in the
State of Oaxaca - a very specific group of people. And I have to say that
it's a similar type of feeling that I get after hearing them that I feel
I don't have anything to say, because that's really where the reality of
what's happening is expressed - in the field, and the plants - and I don't
think there was any hyperbole and what Percy was saying about this being
a very radical change. What Erwin Chargoff was quoted as saying also was
that we are really changing historically - not only historically but evolutionarily
- the face of the biosphere, the face of the earth. We are really changing
evolution as we speak.

It's a really important to time we are living in. What I felt that I
could do here was to try and bring it home, that we are at the epicenter
of that change. That here, specifically in this place, in Berkeley and
the Bay Area, we have been living and generating the changes that are now
rippling through the biosphere - these changes that, I think, will be with
us and will be with future generations longer than nuclear manipulations
of the atmosphere. And it's something that's very difficult to deal with.
It's easy to dismiss because it's something you don't see. For nuclear
pollution, you can bring a reporter with a camera, and you can take pictures
of trees dying, and calves with more or less than four legs, and things
like that. It's very apparent that we're doing something here. But with
the manipulation of the genetic makeup of life, it's something that's very
difficult to follow, very difficult to see. There is no way of following
it.

I come to it as a microbial ecologist, as somebody who has trained and
has focused on trying to understand that world of the unseen. And this
is really where the changes are happening. Expecting to see calves with
three legs and so on from the manipulations that are happening now would
be silly. And that's probably why many people are derided by playing up
the Frankenfood card. Because it's true, we are not seeing anything like
that happening in the environment. But that doesn't mean that there aren't
very radical changes afoot. The changes that we're introducing don't have
a precedent in evolutionary history. And we really don't know what were
doing. We don't even know what we're tampering with.

A very important concept that Paul Goettlich referred to, the concept
of familiarity. We are told that because nobody's dying, because nobody's
falling down dead or because corn plants continue to look like corn plants,
that we are familiar with these manipulations, with these changes, [and]
that what we're doing is substantially equivalent. These are two very important
words - substantial equivalence - they are substantially equivalent to
what we've always had before. And I totally disagree with that. The reason
why, so far, we have not seen [and don't see] anything is because we have
a whole army of people making sure that we don't see those changes happening.
[They make] sure that a corn plants that gets manipulated through transgenic
manipulation continues to look like a corn plant.

Those are the crop breeders - people who have been trained to weed out
what a corn breeder referred to once in a conversation, as the "little
monsters." We are creating little monsters back in the lab. And then we
have this huge screen of plant breeders who will select those and let through
the ones that will actually, in the field, look, behave, taste, and so
on, like corn. So it's not surprising that we would be familiar with those
corn plants because they have been selected from the thousands and millions
of manipulations behind the screen, to look and behave like normal corn,
normal cows, normal whatever it is we're doing.

But, unfortunately, we don't have that army of people, and we don't
have that knowledge to be able to select things like salmon, poplar trees,
moths and flies, that we are manipulating. And we are generating the same
type of diversity back there without having the screen of breeders to tell
us what were actually putting out into the environment. We're just releasing
everything.

And in the case of salmon, poplar trees, and flies, it's still possible
to think that you could go out and find those flies that went loose doing
something unexpected. Then what happens when you go to the world of microbes?
Which is what I work with. It's something that represents 98 percent -
95 percent, if you want to be generous to the big bugs - 98 percent of
living world.

What happens when you go to that world that we having scratched the
surface of, not even seen, let alone name, let alone know, what their biology
is? I believe that is where the most important, the most radical transformations
are happening. And because the world is connected through DNA, and as much
more connected now because we have figured out ways of transgressing the
barriers that used to keep groups separate. Now the world is a lot more
connected. And because that world is connected, I really believe that those
changes are going to come back. Eventually [the changes] will come back
home to roost, and we'll start seeing those transformations coming back
into the world that we care for, the world that we see.

So, how do we deal with radical transformations in a world that we cannot
see that will eventually, sooner or later, come back to the world that
we can see. It's a very serious, difficult question, that is easy to dismiss,
because I'm sure that I won't have to deal with it, personally. Well, almost
sure. But, I'm not sure that my daughter will not have to deal with it,
and her descendants will not have to deal with it. And then it becomes
a question of choices; whether we are willing to just put that the onus
on future generations, on other countries, which is another very important
thing to keep in mind. We're doing transformations here that have consequences
throughout the world, where people might not want them, let alone be aware
of what manipulations are. And, if we want those transformations, are we
willing to just leave the responsibility of following up to them? And why?

Do we want simply to pass that on to them? Or are we really going to
take that responsibility? It's the same type of problems that we confront
with pollution, with just chemical pollution, that we're more used to thinking
of. Right now, I'm not going to keel over and die. I'm not going to be
poisoned right now. Let's leave this problem for the future. And, then
the problem becomes an opportunity. Solving that problem becomes a business
opportunity - a call for a new technological fix for a technological problem.

And that's pretty much, I think, what we have bought into. This is something
that I believe we in the northern hemisphere, specifically Europe and the
United States and Canada, bought into in the late '70s, beginning of the
'80s. And I think there's a very interesting historical trait to be followed,
that indicates that were very clear, conscious decisions to look the other
way.

The concept of familiarity - the concept of substantial equivalence
- really amounts, in my mind, to a very antiscientific principle of not
looking. Let's assume that these things, which we know are being produced
through technologies that we never had access to before, are familiar.
Let's assume that they are not different. So, in a very real way, this
is a mandate to not look. And I think there's a very historical trait that
says, this decision was taken back then as a very good and very reasonable
policy decision, a very central policy decision, both in Europe and the
US.

Follow this logic. We have been seeing an enormous economic development
of the world, especially of Europe and the US, based on technological development.
And we were talking, at that time, about computers, about information technology,
and so on. But we know that those technologies and the economic edge that
they provide are going to go abroad. They're going to follow lower wages
and lower environmental standards. So sooner or later will see them go
away. How are we going to replace them? This is going to come, maybe in
the '90s, maybe in the new century. How are we going to replace them?

So that assumption is actually a really good one and it's proven true.
It's proven right. We've lost that economic edge. The basis of the precisely
the well-being of this whole area, Silicon Valley, and the whole state
of California went away. And we were slated to bring onboard another technological
development that would keep our competitive edge, and would keep our nation,
and supposedly, the whole world going.

Back in the late '70s, beginning of the '80s, central governments were
convinced by a very specific group of people, that that technology had
to be this technological manipulation of life. They really were convinced
about that. And they said, "OK, if we start asking the relevant questions
about risk, about safety, about precaution, then we're never going to get
there. We're never going to be ready when we need this technology. So let's
look the other way. Let's look away from it. Let's not ask the relevant
questions."

And that's precisely what we had as a mandate back in the beginning
of the '80s, which, if you want, you might take as a very reasonable policy
decision. "Let's take this risk, and whatever comes will be a business
opportunity. Will be ahead anyway. So, if this problem crops up back in
Mexico, or it crops up back in Indonesia, we will have the edge to provide
technology to solve the problem. So, it's a pretty good idea."

The question now is, 25 years down the line, do we still continue to
make the same decision? Do we still continue to buy into it? And, more
importantly, did the products of this technology actually deliver the big
promise that central governments were pushing? And I think the answer also
was quoted in that really interesting video [Heartbreak In the Heartland].
The answer is no.

There actually is no clear benefit to the deployment of the technologies
as we know them. There's nothing that I know of the horizon or in the pipeline
that will change this state of affairs. The products out there that reduce,
to some extent, the use of chemicals in the environment are being defeated,
basically, by themselves. And there were reports this year broadcast by
the BBC, by investigative reporting, which is hard to do because the whole
thing is slanted against it. There were reports that favor recite resistant
crops had, this year, to be sprayed with Roundup plus atrazine. They're
having to mix old chemicals that were already phased out. [Old chemicals]
are having a comeback to deal with the problems generated by the technology
itself.

Chemical use has not really been improved. Yield has not been improved
at all. And there is a very important problem that that the equality of
these products - the locus of benefit and cost, or benefit and risk, the
social loci of application of cost and benefit - have been even further
polarized. So that the benefit is accruing in a very different place, for
very different people than the costs and the risks are.

What we are seeing right now is that we are asking African countries
to take on the risk for the technologies [note reference to Zambia refusing
to take GM corn as food aid] that we produced so that we can continue to
milk out the profit. And that, I think is just as important as the actual
physical nature of whether we have a benefit or not from these technologies.

I asked the question again. 25 years down the line, in the face of basically
no benefit from them, and no foreseeable benefit in the future, does is
still makes sense to continue going into the assumption that we want to
going to this risks as a matter of central policy? And I think the answer
is no.

I think weíll stop there. I just wanted to introduce this as a question.
I would like to be led by whatever you people would like to talk about.
Paul, go.

Paul Goettlich:

Would you tell us about your finding in Mexico of the corn and your
experience with the scientific paper in the journal Nature? [ Transgenic
DNA introgressed into traditional maize landraces in Oaxaca, Mexico. Nature
v.414, 541-543 29nov01]

Audience comment:

What really happened with Nature? We're not clear on that.

Ignacio Chapela:

Nobody really knows what really happened with Nature.

I'm really glad to see that David Quist is here, who is the first author
on that paper. So, I hope, David, that you help me out with whatever memory
slips I have.

The story, as I see it, and of course there are 20 stories around this
incident, is as follows.

As a microbial ecologist - I think I gave a background for why I would
be interested in a question like this - I was very interested in seeing
what happens when I introduce this piece of DNA that comes from a bacterium
or a fish, or whatever, into a plant. And I continued to be very interested
in following this as if it were a little microbe moving in the environment
- the new microbe that wasn't there before. Follow it in, see where it
goes. I was interested in asking that question.

At that time, I was serving on a committee for the National Academy
of Sciences looking at the environmental impacts of transgenic crops. And
I asked this question; I said, "couldn't we possibly look at the consequences
beyond the crop that we are putting here in the ground? What happens around
the agricultural field? And the answer that I received very quickly from
the USDA representative was, "No, this committee is not supposed to be
looking at those questions. Those questions have been visited before. These
manipulations will not move significantly out from the boundaries of the
field."

Another very interesting question that I had for myself, beyond the
substantial equivalence question, which also was - we were denied the opportunity
of visiting that question - what happens when you operate in a regulatory
system which is not as robust, I assumed, as the U.S. system is, if you
want. The U.S. system, by comparison with other places, is more or less
regulated, is more or less well policed. But what happens when these products
are deployed, which they will be? If we really get away with it, they will
be deployed throughout the world. What happens in the different regulatory
system? Which was perfectly pertinent to the committee's work. That didn't
lead anywhere either.

At that point, we were discussing with David, and we said, "Sooner or
later were going to see these pieces of DNA - these transgenic constructs
- moving out of the agricultural field where they were planted, moving
out of the neighboring field of, and this case corn, but going well beyond
that. And there are places where this is particularly worrisome - the places
where the crops, corn, or any other crop actually were domesticated, and
the places where these crops have been diversified. Because these places,
geographically, represent the information source, if you want to put it
that way, the databank for the world.

We continue to be dependent on the centers of diversification of our
crops to go back, take genetic material out of those, and put it into our
commercial lines. So our commercial agricultural or even our industrial
agriculture depends really vitally on these centers of diversification
and domestication of our crops.

With David, we were asking, "what happens, what will happen when these
things move?" And it wasn't really question of if. In my mind, it was a
question of when.

On a separate story, I had been collaborating for about 15 years with
a group of indigenous communities in the state of Oaxaca, where we had
established the capacity to deal with microbes, but also the capacity to
analyze DNA. For years, they had been very interested in all the rumblings
about GMOs, and what the consequences could be.

I remember saying, "I think you should really be prepared to be monitoring
yourself instead of waiting for somebody coming to help you, because nobody
will. The corporations are not going to help you because, obviously, they
have no interest in contradicting themselves, since they have been repeating
this mantra that IT'S NOT GOING TO MOVE OUT, IT'S NOT GOING TO MOVE OUT,
IT'S NOT GOING TO GO ANYWHERE. And they've repeated it for many years.

The academic institutions available to you in Mexico or elsewhere are
not really going to be asking these questions. The government is not going
to be asking these questions. So who's going to do it? It has to be you,
the farmers. So why not? You have the lab capacity. Why not look into it?
Why not establish this capacity so when it comes, you'll be ready?"

David had already run several workshops there on different methods in
different technical capacities. And we agreed that he would go down there
with the very few reagents that were necessary to do this monitoring, thinking
that he would be helping to build up the human resources that are
necessary. It takes years to build up a lab like that and get people thinking
about it. It takes years. So, we were thinking that he would be ready for
the time - 5, 10, 15 years down the line - when these transgenic materials
started moving into the area.

The night before the workshop, he did a mock run of the whole thing
with the positive [a corn known to be a GMO variety used to test for the
presence of GMO genes] that he brought from a Safeway [supermarket in the
Bay Area]. He was sure that he should use the local corn, which is touted
as the purest corn in the world, as his negative controls. So, he called
one day in the morning, woke me up, and said, "I'm two hours away from
the workshop and my negative controls are showing positive. So the land
races - the criollo corn, local corn those being grown there - are showing
positive results."

Now, of course, my first response was one of bafflement, but also wondering
whether he had contaminated his samples with the Safeway corn, or if something
was wrong with the method. He brought back samples. We reran the test in
many different ways, in different labs, with all kinds of different controls.
He went down in October, and by March we felt very confident that there
was no question about it.

We wrote it up and submitted a paper to Nature, which is one of the
two magazines of record in science. We received a predisposed response,
initially. At that point I felt that it was extremely important from the
policy point of view, to start talking to people who were going to be affected
by this, especially governments - governmental agencies and so on - were
going to be confronted by the media the moment that this broke out.

We knew it was going to be pretty scandalous. And I didn't want government
officials to be caught by surprise. I wanted them to have time to consult,
to think, and to make up their minds about what they wanted to do with
it, instead of panicking. Because when governments panic, what they do
is go to the safest place, which is usually industry. They would just run
to industry and say, "Please help us. Please save us." And [industry] would
come up with some kind of story.

As we started talking to them - I could make this story as long as you
want - there was a leak from the government to Greenpeace, and eventually
to the Internet, and into the European media. The story was covered as
a front page story - amazingly, as the Afghan war was beginning to evolve
- in the [French] newspaper Le Monde, [which] was carrying half of a front
page dedicated to the Afghan bombing and [the other] half dedicated to
the corn story. It was incredible.

And ever since, that has been rolling in the media. The East Bay Express
[Chapela & Quist: Kernels of Truth - East Bay Express 29may02] is one
of the examples of how much public interest this story has had over the
last year - it's almost exactly one year to the day. In the media, worldwide,
it's really amazing, there has been radio coverage, there's a documentary
in the works, there are books being written. It's really amazing. In the
question is why? Why is the public so interested? And I think you know
the answer.

You wanted me to stay with the Nature story?

Paul Goettlich:

I heard about your trip to Mexico to speak with the government. Who
was [at the meeting] when you got there? [Referring to the GMO industry
representatives present at the prearranged meeting.]

Ignacio Chapela:

Yes, well...

Paul Goettlich:

Who did you go to speak with in Mexico?

Ignacio Chapela:

I spoke to many people. I spoke to many government officials. But, specifically,
the goal keeper for the country, there is a commission on biosafety and
genetically modified organisms. It turns out to have lots of contacts with
the biotech industry, and actually a vested interest in the biotech industry.

I don't need to elaborate. I was given the gangster treatment basically,
trying to bully us into not publishing, trying to bully us into pulling
the paper back. That [drew the attention of] the media, and after a while
we were invited to reconsider our research, to find out that we were wrong,
and to submit another paper saying that were wrong.

Audience Question:

When this happened, was the first paper published?

Ignacio Chapela:

No, it hadn't been published. This all happened prepublication, which
was incredibly complicated, because the paper is being peer reviewed at
that point. It went through a very meticulous peer review - at least four
rounds of peer review, which is relatively unusual.

The paper finally got published. The editor of Nature, Phil Campbell,
had been predisposed, as I said, initially, and then something happened
over the months. As the story evolved, they started getting colder and
colder and colder feet. There was one reviewer who would write two-line
reviews saying, "Don't publish it. This really sucks. Don't publish it."

And the reasons were...there was one technical reason at some point,
she said, "These guys should have a control that is a historical control.
They should find a seed that comes from the same area but pre-GMOs - before
GMOs existed. We actually found something like that in the seed collections.
So we submitted that. At that point, the nasty reviewer just wrote saying,
"This paper is not interesting. Don't publish it."

Fortunately, that was the point where Le Monde was carrying the story
on the front page. So, all I did was to just copy the PDF file and e-mail
it over to Nature, and say, "Please tell me that this story is not interesting
again."

[Audience laughs ]

At that point, I think, there was no way... That's basically when
they decided to just had to run it. So they ran the story. And on the day
that the paper came out, many things happened. The day the paper came out
the OECD - Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which
groups together the so-called developed, or industrialized countries -
was holding meetings in Raleigh, North Carolina to look at the question
of transgenics, and whether we should just forget about the problem and
continue with the commercialization of transgenics.

Apparently the whole meeting was designed to basically give [GMOs] a
blank check and say, "It's been cleared. It's fine. We want to continue
pushing for it." The paper came out right in the middle of [the OECD meeting].
We had some e-mail leakage from people who were working for the PR campaign
for the industry, who were just totally amazed. They just felt that...
There was an e-mail that said, "We really need to figure out where these
guys Quist and Chapela are getting their funding from because they have
engaged some pretty amazing PR power. Their timing has been incredible
the way they have been manipulating the media. These guys are lackeys of
I don't know who. All these enviros...and so on. But they're doing it really
well. We really need to pin them down."

It was brilliant. It was published exactly right in the middle of the
meeting. The whole meeting of OECD had to be re-engineered. They had a
late-night meeting that apparently filled the whole auditorium. People
were standing in hallways to hear about it. The Mexican government representatives
were pulled into this meeting to say something about it. Basically, the
whole meeting flopped because of the paper.

We didn't do anything. We were just struggling to get the paper... the
stupid paper published. If it was up to us, it would have been published
months before, as we felt was going to be the case anyway. Lots of coincidences
like that have been happening over the months. But, as we went along, it
was evident that the Board at Nature was, I think, getting their arm twisted
in a big way.

And poor Phil Campbell, who I consider has his heart in the right place,
is a very intelligent man, and a very good person, I feel, didn't want
to do it. On the one hand, he knew that [he] had a paper that was valuable
in his hands. On the other hand, he was being bullied, obviously bullied
by someone with a lot of power. And I don't know who that is, or who those
people would be.

Up to the moment that the paper was published - the day the paper was
published - there were letters already written that took into account all
kinds of details about the paper. Obviously, the paper had been handled
by people who were preparing a whole discreditation campaign for the paper
that started on the day the paper was published.

Most of it was carried out through the Internet, which is a great way
of doing it, because, of course, you can get away with anything you want
on the Internet. I can say you've killed someone. And [even though] you
didn't, but so what? I've said it already and thousands of millions of
people have seen it.

So that's basically the [way it's] gone over months. The paper was published
in November. December, January, February... by
March, I feel, the pressure at Nature was so strong that [it] was pushed
into publishing two letters... Well, we were asked to recant. We were basically
provided a galley proof. We were provided text that said, "I'm sorry, I'm
sorry. We were wrong. We deserve to be flogged in the public plaza. [Signed]
David Quist and Ignacio Chapela."

Of course, we responded by saying, "No way are we going to sign that!"
Because by that time, the Mexican government been running independent analysis
that confirmed the main statement, which was a statement of contamination.
There was contamination in those places in Oaxaca. So there was no reason
why we should recant.

Failing that, Nature went ahead and published two letters that questioned
the technical value of the paper. And I could talk about that also for
a long time. But, importantly with it, came a very small, brief note from
the editor, Phil Campbell, saying... I should have memorized his
words, but I don't have them in my head... saying, basically, "This paper
was published but we really shouldn't have because now after the event
we have acquired enough information to make us doubt that there was a wise
decision to publish it back then."

And it's as confusing as my wording is.

I've had many people who are much better with language than I am from
the English and Rhetoric Departments look at the actual construction of
the phrases, and it's impossible to make sense of it. What it is, in my
view, it's just fence-sitting by poor Phil Campbell, who is really trying
to come clean on both sides, which is, of course, impossible. That created
[even] more of a scandal.

[ Audience laughs ]

In 1997, I was invited by the United Nations to go and discuss, again,
about the same subject of the environmental impact of transgenic crops
in Leon. And behind the scenes, on the same panel, we were meeting with
a PR representative for Monsanto. And you know, very frankly, I just said,
"What are you guys doing? Back in '97, when this whole campaign against
farmers was beginning, when they were just very nastily going against labeling,
there were just not conceding a single anything." I said, "What are you
guys doing?"

You know, I've worked for the industry. I used to work for Sandoz, which
became Novartis afterwards. And I can understand a lot of the thinking
happening behind the scenes. So I said, "What are you guys doing? You're
really hurting yourselves. You should at least concede on something. You
know, labeling, or something. Instead of just painting yourselves as...as...[being]
bad that people are going to shoot you."

These PR people said, "You know, that's exactly the message that we
continued to give Monsanto, the management. But they are just so arrogant
that they just don't listen to us. We are working for them. We are the
company. And they just don't listen. They're just so secure in their feeling
that they have governments in their pockets, that they have the whole game
laid out for them, that they're just not willing to consider anything."

Basically, the same thing was happening for us where there was this
incredible arrogance and belief that just because Nature published something,
a little note that said, "Well, we published it, but maybe we shouldn't
have, but maybe we should," that that was going to be enough to just get
people not to pay attention to it. Of course, it worked the other way around.
And that just drew more and more attention to it. The scandal continued.

We also have Ken Worthy here, who, together with a whole bunch of other
people at Berkeley, Jason and other people, drafted letters. Apparently,
of flood letters coming into Nature complaining about, not only about the
fact that they were just going after a legitimate paper, but mostly about
the proceedings. This is not something that you do in science. If you're
going to publish a paper after your peers have reviewed and you feel that
it's worth[y] to go in print, it goes into print. And then it's open for...it's
up for grabs. People are perfectly justified in coming after it and showing
that it was wrong, or showing that it was mistaken in its interpretations,
or whatever. That's a perfectly common occurrence in science. The weird
thing was that Nature would see it fit to come out - and some people say
totally unprecedented in the history of science, I don't know - to come
out and kind of withdraw a paper on their own, which is not a withdrawal.

With apparently enormous pressure now on the other side of Phil Campbell,
he seemed to be convinced that he had to publish something. So he published
a letter from the people at Berkeley as well as a letter written by people
from about four different universities from across the country complaining
about Nature. And then he publishes yet another little note, saying, "This
paper was not withdrawn by either the authors or Nature."

[Audience laughs ]

It's really difficult to know where that whole thing stands from the
point of view of whether you'd decide that the paper has been withdrawn
or not withdrawn, or whatever. The reality is that the statement of contamination
in Mexico, which is a very important statement, and to me, again - one
sampler from that massive manipulation that we' re doing in the environment
went totally unaccountable and totally without ways of finding out what
we're doing - that is confirmed now. It has been confirmed by study after
study after study, using different methods, using different approaches,
different labs, and so on.

So, there is no question about it. The question is what is going to
happen? With the policy? Are we going to be able to do anything about it?
The question is out there. Now what is the response that we get? And so
far, the response has been very contradictory. You have on the one hand,
a whole group of people, many people who are really outraged, especially
because of the process. Because we had been promised that this would not
happen for years and years and years. And now it's happening. So it may
not be a surprise for many of you. But on the other hand, you have all
the other people who just shrugged their shoulders and say, "So what? Let's
just keep going."

I'll stop there and field some questions or following discussion with
you, where you want to take it.

Audience Question:

Since you've been working closely with the communities in Oaxaca, to
you know what the [indiscernible name] ... I know [Mexican president] Fox
isn't really concerned about this whole business, but... [indiscernible]
Are they doing something? Or is there anything that can be done?

Ignacio Chapela:

There is a lot going on. We could also talk for another hour about that,
but there is Congressional as well as Senate action going on. Congress
and the Senate in Mexico have been pretty strongly protectionist in the
sense of pushing to stop the flow of transgenic maize and into Mexico through
different channels. There was a change of the criminal code, making it
a crime to possess, transport, sell, buy, move, whatever. Any transgenic
organism affects, or might affect the environment, which is an incredibly
blanket statement about, "let's just not have transgenics in the country.
Not in the lab. Not anywhere," which, is being defeated now because many
scientists are complaining about it.

There are proposals for new legislation stopping the importation of
[GMO] corn until it is either killed by grinding or in any other way, or
segregated and labeled as GMO-free. However, at the same time, you have
the economy ministry passing, recently, an authorization to import more
corn from the U.S., even though it's not segregated or labeled. The attitude
is very schizophrenic.

For the general public, we might be talking Mexican politics here, but
it's really important to recognize that what's happening there is that
the whole future of the developing world, in this book regards, is being
played out, or was being played out over the last year in Mexico. So, whatever
happens in local politics in Mexico, I think is mirroring out to what is
now evolving in Africa, what will happen in Southeast Asia, in South Asia,
and so on. So, it's really important.

Schizophrenic reactions. Schizophrenic response.

On the one hand, you have environment saying, "Oh, we care. And we're
doing all these studies, and so on," and coming up and saying, "yes, it's
there. Now, it's someone else's business, someone else's responsibility
to say what to do with it." And then the rest of the executive branch says,
"We don't care." You know, we just let through, which is economy and agriculture.
The economy and agriculture are basically run by people who have very strong
ties to the biotech industry - agbiotech industry - were even have the
biotech industry in their hands. The largest noncommodity seed company
in the world that is very vested, or was very vested in GMOs, is owned
by a Mexican who is very good friends with President Fox, and is actually
his adviser.

It's not surprising that...[same person asks what his name is] Romo,
Alfonso Romo.

So it's not surprising that the president, who should be making this
decision - there is total contradiction in the executive branch at the
level of ministries - so you would expect that the president would be making
those decisions. And the president has not made any statements. The BBC
got him to say... apparently, they got him in the middle of another interview
- they're interviewing him on something else - and they said, "What you
think about the contamination of the corn in Mexico?" And he said, "Oh,
it is a problem that we are looking into, and poverty is a very serious
problem for Mexico, and we're doing a lot about poverty in Mexico," and
something like that. And that's all he said.

We don't know how it's going to be resolved. It's an incredibly difficult
thing to do. If you think of NAFTA, if you think of the dependency of Mexico
and many other developing countries on trade with U.S., it's an incredibly
difficult thing to do for the government to take any other stance than
saying, "OK. We really hate it, but were letting it come in any way."

[ five minutes of tape without sound ]

Leuren Moret:

...the Teotihuacán culture, and what they did was, they planted
crops - this was about ten years ago - using modern technology and modern
seed - potatoes I think. And they planted crops with the traditional plant
food, using the Teotihuacán planting technology. And the crop yield
was ten times higher with the ancient technology. In reality, if you look
at natural foods, they aren't much more nutritious than this engineered
stuff [???sic].

So, how is this benefiting poor people, or feeding them, when it's actually
draining resources and not really feeding them?

Ignacio Chapela:

I don't think there's any question about it, that there are many different
alternatives. In going into this avenue, that we decided to go into as
a country, or as a hemisphere, in the '70s and '80s, we just decided not
to look at the other alternatives. But, I think you're right, whenever
people look, people find that, yes, there are much better ways of doing
it. And there are ways in which you can increase productivity. I always
remind myself of of this rice study [Genetic Diversity and Disease Control
in Rice Nature 406, 718 - 722 17aug00] where the cultivation of rice -
this is a very large, very large-scale, probably one of the largest agricultural
studies ever done. It was done in China, in cooporation with Oregon State,
Oregon University, I forget, with many thousands of farmers.

And the question was, the experiment was, what is the difference between
planting one single variety of rice vs. two varieties, nothing else. Or
industrial agriculture, high input, mechanized, everything else. The only
difference is one variety/two varieties. They had incredible results, incredible
results after the first year. They already have some situations where they
could get an increasing yield of 89 percent, and a reduction in fungicide
use, which is the main pesticide input into this agricultural system, down
to zero. There were not applying any fungicide anymore.

I'm not saying that is always going to be the case. What I'm saying
is that we have forgotten, we just decided not to look at the alternatives.
In any analysis of cost/benefit we really should have that the standard,
as the gold standard, the best possible alternatives. Not what we're doing
right now, which is often what is used as the standard. We should know
about the best standard and have that as the point of reference. And we
should try to improve on that standard, and keep that as a reference. And
say, "What are the alternatives?" Before saying, either this or that, which
is industrial agriculture or biotech agriculture. Why do I have these two
options when I know there are 20 others around that I decided not to look
at?

Audience Question:

You mentioned Africa. I would like to know what's occurring there are
currently. And the second question is, are we possibly, as human beings
affected by this too through the similarity of the genetic building blocks?

Ignacio Chapela:

Those are two very big questions.

The question on Africa, I should just say I'm not as informed as I could
be or as a should be, mostly because the developments in Africa are very
recent. The last few months really is when... it's very clear to me that
he is a strategy of industry has release shifted from the very loudly promoting
and trying to push PR convincing countries like Mexico, or Columbia, or
other countries like that, and get shot in the foot every time. They opened
their mouth and they get shot again, again, and again. I think their strategy
has changed to go under, keep quiet, and go to place where people really
don't have the technical capacity, are really don't have the social and
technical framework to deal with it. And that is, unfortunately, many places
in Africa.

They have pushed very strongly, in the last few months - you've seen
it in the newspapers - how they have pushed several countries into the
very awkward position saying no to the importation of GMOs, even though
this is aid food that is coming to them when they have populations of people
who are actually starving. It's a great PR, totally shameless I think,
incredibly shameless [The Fake Parade JONATHAN MATTHEWS / Freezerbox 3dec02],
but very good, very strong PR campaign that they have shifted into.

I see the whole developments in Africa, again, as a very rhetorical,
very PR-based move by the industry. Surprisingly, as we saw during the
Johannesburg meetings, and we continue to see over these months, these
last few months and weeks, there were confronted again by people who might
not totally at the speed with the latest in the technology, but they've
been confronted by governments as well as populations of people who just
keep saying, "no." The just keep kicking and screaming as their pushed
into it. That includes central governments as well as individual researchers.

I have been receiving lots of requests for information and advice from
individual researchers, people in the universities, as well as government
officials or saying, "We don't really know much about it, but we really
want to hear from you guys because you obviously have been confronted with
this before." And now, I don't know why we are being flooded with it.

Do you want an answer to your other question?

Audience Question:

Yes. Please.

Ignacio Chapela:

The question was, how could we see these manipulations - transgenic
manipulations of DNA - in other species come back to humans? Could we,
and how?

I see two ways.

One, which is the biological route, which is totally speculative but
not implausible and not unlikely, is a process called horizontal gene transfer.
We know that are we are connected with the rest of DNA-based, carbon-based
life over evolutionary time. When Hegel and Darwin, and those people were
thinking of evolution, they use to think of evolution as has a continuously
expanding trade, with branches always diverging away from each other. You
have pure lines that are always getting purer and purer, and kind of diverging
away from... DNA work - this molecular biology knowledge
- has helped us realize that this is not really the case, the way evolution
happens. There is a lot of what's called reticulation, where you have feedback,
movement of genetic material from one of these branches to the other. So
what we have, really, is a net of life, of interconnected life.

The rate of movement is very low, especially for organisms like ourselves,
that are really good at telling self from nonself. And really good at pushing
out bacteria that come into your body, and so on. Some of you might be
surprised that everyone of your cells is made not of a cell that you can
call pure Arian, or whatever your race might be. But, it's actually made
of your cells, or the cells of your ancestors plus bacteria that have been
incorporated into it through evolutionary times, called your mitochondria.
Those mitochondria really evolved from, or are the descendants of a totally
different evolutionary lineage than the other part of your ancestors. They
met at some point.

There are routes through which we should expect, over evolutionary time,
to see the interconnectedness of life operates like that. I think there
are much better, much easier ways of thinking about this question, and
that is how it is we are using the technology to transform humans. And
I know tonight, we been talking a lot about agbiotech, and a lot of public
attention goes to agbiotech, and biotech in the environment, but the technology
itself denies the difference between humans in nonhumans. That's the whole
point of the technology.

There are incredible advances out there that are pointing to, or aiming
at transforming the human genome by incorporating either pieces from other
humans, but also pieces from other organisms, or producing pigs that will
carry proteins - human proteins, or human genes - and express that. So,
we are trying, we are really working at erasing the difference between
species in the lab. We're pushing the envelope. We're continuously pushing
the envelope, and I totally expect - I mean, where actually doing it already
- that we're going to see that route, the natural evolution route, but
there's also the human-induced route of exchange of DNA between species.
It will happen.

Audience Question:

Is there anything going on in United States legislation about genetic
drift, specifically having to do with organic food? Because it seems like
their M. O. his kind of no GMOs, so if... I've
heard that even organic foods are...

Ignacio Chapela:

I think that the legislation point to make, simply is that the policy
is not to look. And it continues to be. You're not supposed to talk about
it. You're not supposed to distinguish it. And Simon is probably going
to give us an update on where legislation is right now.

Simon Harris:

With regards to the FDA, there now going after the organic companies
that are labeling their foods GMO-free. So they basically ignored all the
hundreds of thousands of comments from people who want labels, and they're
saying that the organic food companies are labeling them as not having
genetically modified ingredients could be misrepresenting that and so there
now going after them saying that they don't have the right to put those
labels on there.

Paul Goettlich:

That was Simon Harris, the West Coast organizer for the Organic Consumers
Association. He has been working very hard on the fundraising event for
Percy Schmeiser on this Thursday at the Greenpeace office.

Dr. James Diamond, the incoming chair of the Sierra Club's Genetic Engineering
Committee:

The Sierra Club's Genetic Engineering Committee has been talking to
Sen. Harkin, who said that he would hold hearings after the election. So
there might be some action.

Ignacio Chapela:

On labeling?

Dr. James Diamond:

No, on genetic contaminations. Once it comes about, I'll try to push
it as much as we can.

Ignacio Chapela:

So, it's going to be driven by Sierra Club?

Dr. James Diamond:

It's not driven by Sierra Club, it's as much noise is we can make.

Ignacio Chapela:

The California legislature, in 2001 had hearings about this. They were
run by Tom Hayden. And Tom said, "Don't expect anything to change in the
legislature." He said something incredible like... We were talking about
the University, and about it was involving itself with industry too far,
and he said, "This house, referring to the Senate, is as rotten as your
University. So don't expect this house to pass anything on this now. But,
at least we are going to leave a market. We are going to leave a market
on the wall as we're dragged out of this room - it was in incredible metaphorical
thing - as we're dragged out of this room, were going to leave a mark that
something happened here. We cannot just go without..."

Leuren Moret:

Dennis Kucinich, the Democrat from Ohio, is working on food labeling
for GM food. I don't know where it is now.

Dr. James Diamond:

It's introduced every year.

Ignacio Chapela:

But it's killed in the house. If I was a politician I would try that
and with a very strong PR campaign. It's just such a winner. Everybody
wants labeling except the people in power right now. Who cares about the
FDA? If you have a good PR campaign and you are strong politician, you
could get away with it.

Audience Question:

[Recording unclear. Unable to understand.]

Ignacio Chapela:

I find it sad that we should be thinking that labeling is a great accomplishment
here. It just gives you are the measure of how low our standards of democratic
treatment of technology have dropped. Because what's wrong with going for
saying no? What's wrong for saying no to environmental releases? That should
be among the cards for any democracy, I believe. The fact that we are finding
it so hard to even talk about labeling his kind of discouraging. And you're
right, labeling cannot be the goal, cannot be the final step of anything
because it's just so discriminatory in many ways, especially when you think
of those people you're talking about, but also about international relationships.
But about the countries that just get dumped - all the stuff that the Europeans
and the Japanese don't want to buy?

Audience Question:

Iíve done some study of genetically engineered foods, and I have about
five things that I read and five different sources. But I only want to
address one thing, and that is, I spent about an hour and a half at Albertson's
going through the baby foods, and except for one company, the Gerber, the
Heinz, the infant milk, they'll have soybeans as one of the main things.
And there's another thing. The San Francisco Chronicle had an article on
children who have autism. That they diagnosed, supposedly, 9 cases everyday
of these young children, and I beginning to wonder what is the factor?

Ignacio Chapela:

That's a big tragedy.

Dr. James Diamond:

Baby food companies aren't buying GE ingredients.

Audience Question:

How do you know?

Dr. James Diamond:

Well, I've heard that. I don't have absolute guarantees.

Audience Comment:

The ones I have seen, it was four months ago that I did this, I didn't
see it. I've been reading very carefully. I didn't see anything like that.

Paul Goettlich:

I do think they actually label the stuff.

Audience Comment:

You think they would. They should.

Paul Goettlich:

Their policy, many of them, their policy is to do that. You can say,
well, maybe they're not doing that because they don't want to alarm people.
The other point is, maybe they're not doing it because they don't want
to... If they need a product that a certain time and they can't get an
organic or non GMO, then they can still use it. It's not labeled, therefore
they can still use it. It's not labeled, therefore they are not liable
for anything.

Dr. James Diamond:

Nobody can guarantee 100 percent, which makes it a little bit difficult
to label. I understand they're trying very hard to... I'm a pediatrician.
I hear this through pediatric sources.

Paul Goettlich:

He is also the incoming chair of the Sierra Club's national Genetic
Engineering Committee.

Ignacio Chapela:

The Sierra Club has been really leading in this.

Paul Goettlich:

I think the labeling... a question next, but, the point about labeling,
while it's not going to cure anything, it will bring attention to it. And
for a lot of people - mainline consumers - they only [way they] can approach
this is through labeling. That's all they can deal with. That's it. Period.
They canít deal with the harm or the politics, or anything but "I have
a choice." That's it. So, that's all [they] deal with.

A question from this woman right here.

Audience Question:

Is it safe to assume, if you have found a number of genetically modified
strains in Oaxaca, that all of the corn produced here or in Europe has
traces as well? What can you do about it?

Ignacio Chapela:

It's safe to assume that all corn in the world is contaminated, what
can we do?

Audience Question:

If you go to the place where they were trying to preserve it, and you
find it is contaminated...

Ignacio Chapela:

Well, nobody was really, explicitly, trying to preserve it. In fact,
it was being... the whole infrastructure - the human infrastructure and
the ecological infrastructure - is being eroded all the time. So, there's
no explicit effort to preserve that. We are hoping that this is really
raising attention among farmers, as well as governments and so on. That
and explicit effort is made, I don't think anybody was doing that.

Audience Question:

The East Bay Express article sort of implied that there was a concerted
effort to actually preserve the integrity. At least that's the way I understood
the article.

Ignacio Chapela:

Farmers there are working for themselves. There is no... There are farmers
organizations that are really good at seed saving, and so on. But the thinking
is not that, they're not making an altruistic movement for the world. They're
doing it, but they're not doing it consciously. In part of the whole thing
is to close the loop. There is a very clear vicious circle that connects
my tax dollars with subsidization and killing of the American farmers so
that we can dump underpriced commodity grain onto the ships in the Atlantic
that go around, go to Mexico, get fed into Mexico where farmers [are told],
"If you want to produce your own seed in these places in Oaxaca, you have
to subsidize it out of your pocket at the tune of about 30 percent of the
cost. And that pushes you out of the land. And since you're to California,
to either clean my bathroom or to do agricultural work. Totally contradictory,
totally crazy thing. You're pushing them out so they can come out and do
agricultural work here.

Audience Question:

It's sort of like a precursor of a different world where, obviously
NAFTA will never have the consequences that the state of [?] have. There's
nothing that... what NAFTA says it wants to do to equalize salaries and
eradicate poverty obviously doesn't work. Because this is the vicious circle
that is going on. Could we assume that the strains of corn are being contaminated
around here? What you guys were doing about testing it, is that something
that can be done by small organic farmers here in California?

Ignacio Chapela:

Yes. They commit an easily, relatively easily with $10,000 you can do
a farm association lab that will people to do this. You need a big network.
You need to have places to confirm the results, to have legitimations,
certification, all kinds of balances and checks for the whole thing. But
it's doable. I think it is a fair assumption to say that maize in North
America will have different degrees of contamination. I'm really interested
in doing that - the geographical distribution over North America.

I don't know about Africa, but it's possible that Africa's also very
contaminated. Asia will be a little less because they are more reliant
upon the diversity centers. I think in places like India, because there
is a very good maize diversity center there, is probably an interesting
place to look into. But in general, I think it's not a bad assumption to
say this is happening all of the place.

Then what to do, I think something really important to keep in mind,
that weíre told that, "The genie's out of the bottle, stop complaining
and swallow it." There's any number of genies in any number of bottles.
In those bottles are pretty well stoppered. So the fact that this happened,
I think, should be a cautionary tale for what's to come. And what is coming
is it, and I'm sorry to be scandalous, because it is scandalous, what's
coming is spermaticidal corn - corn that is designed to produce a compound
that will render human male sperm unviable. What's coming is vaccines in
your food. What's coming is pharmaceuticals in your food, and so on.

This should be a cautionary tale and we should be glad that we were
lucky this time around that it's not really so bad. But we should really
the thinking that the genie is to come are so much more important than
this one genie. And we should never buy that idea that the genie's out
of the bottle, forget about it now, eat it.

Paul Goettlich:

Crop trials for pharmaceuticals is already going on here in California.

Ignacio Chapela:

Is happening. It's probably happening in Mexico. One other thing that's
interesting about Mexico, Mexico is that the same time the place where
we want to keep that genetic diversity in place. And yet, is also the place
where were doing the most experimentation. All the experimentation for
corn in the U.S. is first carried out in Mexico. It's a total crazy, again,
and very contradictory policy.

Paul Goettlich:

The same thing is happening with the indigenous people in, I think it's
in Michigan [White Earth Land Recovery Program]. Winona LaDuke spoke recently
at the Black Oak Bookstore [in Berkeley], and she was telling about her
project with saving the wild rice, and about the land grant universities
that are doing exactly the opposite - they're trying to make that natural
wild crop into something that they can make some money out of. Which means
standardizing it, and putting in into large plots of land. And patenting
it, and saying itís theirs.

The natural wealth of poor people all around the world is just that,
their biodiversity. And we don't see that [biodiversity] is ours as well.
Gold is garbage. The wealth that we have is biodiversity. And the more
variations we have, the better we are. And what commercial agriculture
is doing is narrowing down, making one apple, one potato. This is dangerous.
This is very dangerous.

There was a question back here.

Audience Comment:

Oh, I wanted to comment on what you said about us being consumers. [Recording
and its abruptly here]

Ignacio Chapela:

For those products that are being developed right now Michael Pollan
has a great, Uncle Pollan and the writer, has a great way of referring
to them, and he calls them rhetorical technologies. A lot of what's happening
in the industry right now is totally reactive to the big, big falling on
your face that the first generation, the second generation products had.
But we are discussing tonight, and what Percy's being persecuted for, is
really already passed. And it was a big failure.

From the point of view of industry, just looking at the stocks of these
companies can tell me what they're doing. Even beyond the falling stock
prices for all the other companies, their really doing badly. The response
is rhetorical. And this one is about doing something - they couldn't increase
yields, they couldn't reduce chemicals use, they couldn't do anything better
than that. Now let's try and onion something that we can put up a poster
child - literally a poster child who was saved from polio by eating his
bananas.

That's what it is. And it's hard to distinguish between the PR part
and the real problem-driven technological development.

Audience Comment:

They don't want us to populate anymore. [Cannot hear the rest of comment
because of background noise]

Ignacio Chapela:

I think on that note maybe we should...

Paul Goettlich:

Just one note please. There's a French scientist that did this study
in Québec on the St. Lawrence River that found in the sludge of
the river, a buildup of Bt toxin from the runoff of the corn fields. So
it's building up, it's not going away, it doesn't disappear, it mixes with
everything... and it's time to say something folks. Real loud. This is
not a conspiracy. This is our government doing it to us - the FDA, the
USDA, the EPA. They're all the same. They are Monsanto. They go in and
out, in and out of Monsanto to the government.

I would like to thank you all for being here.

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